David Hughes is the Daily Telegraph's chief leader writer. He has been covering British politics for 30 years.

Is Gordon Brown getting the Kinnock treatment?

The years of the Blair ascendancy rather blinded us to the fact that Labour leaders have sometimes had a tough time of it in Washington. Today's reports of Gordon Brown not quite getting the welcome he was expecting suggests we may be reverting to type.

The Prime Minister was of course tempting fate with the sententiousness of his language en route to the US – "Past British prime ministers have gone to Washington to talk about wars. I'm going to talk about stability for the future".

The last Labour leader to get his fingers burned in the White House was Neil Kinnock. His visit to Ronald Reagan in 1986 turned into not so much a car crash as multi-vehicle pile-up.

He was granted just half an hour of the president's time and the meeting did not go well, not least when Reagan addressed the shadow foreign secretary, Denis Healey, as Mr Ambassador.

After the meeting, the Labour team held a press conference saying how swimmingly it had all gone. As they spoke, the White House issued its own take on the meeting which focused on the president's profound concerns about Labour's policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament which he feared could lead to a third world war . Not a great success, then.

Kinnock was at something of a disadvantage not only because of his ban the bomb policies but also because of Reagan's anxiety to do what he could to help his best buddy Margaret Thatcher who was shortly to take on Kinnock in a general election campaign.

There's no such sub-text here. Maybe Barack Obama will just do things differently – or maybe we are getting our first taste of Britain's new place in the pecking order in Washington.